Lead Designer Sam Bass commented on this issue, The player progression system works "across single-player, multiplayer and skirmish and all the information is stored in a server. So if you go to another machine -- friend’s house, Internet cafĂ© -- whatever, you can login with your profile and all the stuff you’ve unlocked is accessible to you there. It all lives on a server so you can’t really do dedicated servers with that."It seems to be a more popular way to go for companies these days to cut out LAN and dedicated server support. I'm personally not a huge fan of this news, but at the same time, "times are a changin'" and you can't really do anything about that.